


The Great Peril of Her Existence

by scioscribe



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Gen, Ghosts, Loneliness, Post-Canon, Self-Mutilation, Visions, mentions of cannibalism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-13
Updated: 2019-01-13
Packaged: 2019-10-08 03:07:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17378423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Silna encounters souls and opportunities.





	The Great Peril of Her Existence

**Author's Note:**

> My information on Netsilik beliefs comes from a patchwork of sources, but the most compact-but-cohesive is probably [this article from The Vintage News](https://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/02/01/the-fascinating-diversity-of-the-inuit-belief-system/). If anyone has any good sources for Netsilik cosmology/religion/beliefs/culture, etc., I'd love links in comments and will heap praise upon you.
> 
> (Knowing me, you'd think the weasels here are a _Stand_ reference, but they actually come from the belief that dreams of weasels are a sign of trouble. Thanks, Canadian Encyclopedia.)
> 
> The title is adapted from an Inuit quote about spirits and the moral cost of living: "The great peril of our existence lies in the fact that our diet consists entirely of souls."

Silna was watching for the hare to show itself again.  It was hard to pick its shape out from the snowbank but her empty belly depended upon her doing it—she closed her eyes every now and then, resting them, like that would let her appease the steady light and uniformity of the world around her that made the landscape into an uninterrupted stretch of white.  She waited.

She was tired, cold, and lonely.  The hare, if she killed it, would let her eke out her life a little longer; she’d come to think only in days.  Once she had thought—it had amused her to think—that she would become an old woman, as much without teeth as she’d be without tongue, with her hair gone sealskin gray.  _Angakuit_ had long lives, after all.  They were bound to the _tuunbaq_ , like two parts of a seam pulled together by a thread, and they were of one fate.

Or they had been—had been, until she’d failed.

Aglooka, while they had pulled the sled together, had talked sometimes in his own language; his words rumbled like stones, with one occasionally round enough, pleasant enough to the ear, to be comprehensible to her.  Then he would remember himself and speak properly.

“Do you want to know of Dr. Goodsir?”

She’d shaken her head.  _Even when we have to sink so low as that,_ she had wanted to say to him, _we do not lay our dead out on tables to be hacked at, we do not do things so monstrously.  If you had anything to do with it I do not want to know.  If you talk about it I will go away._

“He cared for you,” Aglooka had said.  “He asked me if I thought you were safe.  I said you had returned to your home.”

She’d nodded.  Her eyes had burned; her mouth had tasted of salt.

She’d seen the drunkenness in Aglooka’s eyes the night he had threatened her and she had not seen it since; since then, she had seen nothing in him but steadiness, as if he’d wrestled his weakness, and the cruelty that had taken shape around it, to the ground.  Good.  She still did not love him enough to let him say things she didn’t want to hear.  She had turned her face away and let the wind sting her cheeks.

To her surprise, he’d understood.  He’d touched her gently, clumsily, with his own blunted forearm.  “I am sorry.  I won’t speak of it again.”

Yet she had liked walking with him, for all the pain and horror he had brought her.  It had been an excuse for company, the last long stretch of company she would ever have; for a time a thread had run back and forth between their two lives as well, binding them close.  And now—now none of that, either.

And no more dinners around the campfire, no more beating her hands against her knees as the married women bandied their songs back and forth like polished knives, flensing away the fat of the evening, letting out the bad blood.  No one would ever again admire a carving she’d done.  It was all gone—she would have no more connection—not profound, not uneasy, and not familiar.  She was gone.

The hare came into view once more.  She’d live another day.

*

Later, sitting at her supper, holding one of the small and greasy bones in her hands, Silna heard a noise.

She came to her feet.  Her fingers curled around one of her amulets.  Sometime in the last few nights, she could not remember exactly when, she had dreamt of weasels, a circle of them around her, watching her.

She couldn’t know whether her life would be saved or ended by her calling out, and she had no way to shape any words.  She whistled a few notes instead.  Her voice, such as it was, had thickened from lack of use.

Out of the dark came a man.

It had been a year now, but Silna knew his face, with its unnatural narrowness, as sharp and pale as a splinter of bone.  It was the man who had dragged her from her makeshift home, put bruises on her; the man who had slaughtered the family he’d met on the ice, neither knowing them nor caring for them.  He had stirred up men to kill her.  She couldn’t remember his name, but she could not forget his face.  So his spirit still strutted about and he had come for her again and she had called him in, she had summoned him out of the dark.  It made sense that he would look for her.  She had shared her spirit with his killer.

His soul was like clotted blood and his soul was now all he had.  She wouldn’t let him see her fear.

She raised her chin to him.

He smiled.  His teeth shone out at her like stars.  When he spoke, it was in her language rather than his own.

“We meet again, Lady Silence!  Don’t click your charms at me, now, we’re on the same side, you and me.  The beast swallowed both our tongues, after all, and then left us with nothing—not so much as a shilling on the pillow or some lovely stains on our trousers.”

Silna drew one finger across her throat.

“Yes, dead.  Dead and not even gone—it spat my soul back out onto the ice.  You should offer me some rabbit, it’s not like you can taste it.”

But she could, a little, because she had not cut far enough back.

“You know the last meal I had?”  He looked wistful.  “Bits of your Dr. Goodsir.  So fresh off him that the meat steamed in the air.”

Silna’s hand tightened around her amulet.  She was pulling it down without meaning to; the leather thong was cutting into the back of her neck.

“Did you ever kiss him?  I think it was Hodgson who got _his_ tongue—now that’s a waste—so I hope you had it while it was there for the having.  Go on now.”  His eyes had gotten brighter, shinier now in the dancing light of her fire.  “Send me off.  It’s your duty to truck with spirits and demons, isn’t it?  Send me off or invite me in.  Or at least give me the rabbit,” he said again, “I’m empty to my backbone.  I was going to eat breadfruit—one a day at least, I thought.  Things never work out as we expect.”

Silna let go.  He’d tried to rile her—he wanted her to lay his spirit somehow.  Knowing what he intended made her bound to refuse him.  She shook her head.  She let him see her open palms, let him know that there wasn’t anything she needed to grasp to keep from being afraid of him.  She wouldn’t help him, not from fear and not from kindness.

His smile only widened, like each refusal would make him smile further still until there'd be nothing left of him but teeth and emptiness.  “I can follow you.  Right on your heels.  It took me some time to find you, but staying close… that’ll be nothing.”

She regarded him dispassionately.  It would vex her, yes, to have him always trailing along in her wake, and ghosts sometimes scared off the game.  But she was nearly as lonely and hungry as he was, and even his sordid company seemed of some value.  The anger helped to keep her warm.

But if he were always with her, she sensed he might rub her resolve down to nothing, and she might end not by dispersing his spirit but by tying it to her own.  She felt the call of him, after all.  She did not like her soul standing on its own—that natural thing had become unnatural for her the moment she had offered up her tongue.  She wasn’t made of stone.  She could be persuaded to relent, to braid her soul to even such a creature as this, when the nights grew long enough, when it began to seem like too much trouble to hunt, too much trouble to live.

She refused to let herself sigh.  Let him wonder at the cause of her resignation; let him wonder how she felt about it.  She motioned him closer.

He came, shivering in the cold as if he truly felt it.  He’d have lost his ears and fingers by now, if he were still alive.  He wasn’t dressed for winter.  He’d have lost every delicate part of himself.

She held the rabbit bone out to him just to see if he could take it.

His hand closed around it, his lips pursing briefly with what she thought was relief, and he drew the bone to his mouth and chewed at it like a wolf.

Aglooka had told her this one had cut his tongue out and tried to steal the _tuunbaq_ from her, so she knew he was telling her the truth about having offered it up.  But he was speaking to her now.  His offering must have been rejected as thoroughly as his soul, for him to not be as voiceless in death as she was in life.  He was no brother to her.  Only a stranger who had once been an enemy.

But she owed it to herself to guard her own soul—and he was a spirit and she was an _angakkuq_.  It was her responsibility to treat with him.

To walk with him in her dreams, so he would haunt no one else.

She put that across to him as well as she could with gestures and he seemed to understand her—enough, at least, to not rattle on in her ear while she tried to sleep.  But it was hard, trusting the darkness enough to fall into it when she knew he was right there with her, a breath of malice given form.  A man, she thought, closing her eyes more tightly.  Only a man, and a dead one, at that.

Silna fell into the shadows between waking and dreaming.  The man was there with her, pale and almost shapeless cargo, a smear of light, the white-on-white of the hare that did not wish to be killed but must die if she were going to live.  This one did want to die, at the forefront of his mind, but that had not, she thought, convinced him of it.  He hid from her.  She lured him forth, again with the rabbit bone, which she had carried with her into the dream.

Even here, she had no tongue.  She was as proud of that as she was mournful of it.

It took, though, a number of gestures before she could communicate to him what she wanted to know.

“Cornelius Hickey,” he said finally.  Then, “No.  Elijah Cook.”

The smile was back again.  He seemed to want to explain the difference to her, but it was nothing as far as she was concerned; she assumed he’d simply been using another name to hide from various spirits and powers.  He was the kind to have angered them.

In her dream, the amulets she wore were part of her, carved from her own bones.  She could trail her fingers up her arms, bare at her wish, and feel the shape of them beneath her skin.

_Elijah Cook._

She could feel him.  She didn’t want to, but she needed to, so she bore it.

Only a man.  So hungry in death that he’d begged for a bit of her rabbit.  So bitter in his soul that he’d sickened the _tuunbaq_ and brought up the creature’s bile.

If she made him into a dark spirit, he would become one.  And then there would be no end to the trouble he could do.

She felt the protections and invocations of her body flare up with heat.

_Elijah Cook.  Send him on.  Send him away.  He is done here, Nuliajuk, he was of the sea, was of your realm, so I beg you, you and Moon Man, take him away, bear him out again.  Bring his soul to some other place and let him not return to us._

She was singing in her throat, the words audible only to the spirits.  She created a rhythm against her very bones.

She prayed and beseeched all through her sleep, or so it felt to her, and when she woke again, he was gone.

So she was alone again.

*

But her intercession for Elijah Cook worked some small change in the world, formed some crack in the ice that widened with each passing day, and as Silna went on, heartsick and lonely, following whatever game she could find, she began, slowly, to draw company.

The ghosts showed themselves to her sometimes as men and women—her own people whom she knew to have died and some more of the white sailors—and when they required it of her, Silna brought them with her into her dreams and asked for their safe passage on.  Not all of them wanted to go.  She was too weary to make any of them submit to an exile they did not want; she wouldn’t force it on those she did not know to be a threat to her people.  None of the ghosts lingered in her presence—they seemed, more than anything else, to be presenting themselves for some kind of accounting.  Silna took note of it all.  She tried to record their names in her mind, but the English ones in particular, odd combinations of unpleasant and squashy sounds, slipped away from her.

Then Goodsir came to her.

Silna saw at once that he was not a ghost in the way the others had been.  She would not see him again in this life—his soul was as gone as the carved-away pieces of his flesh.  This was a vision dressed in his shape, that was all.  She did not like it.

She stood still, watching him.  Unsure.

“You’ve been busy,” the vision said.  It was his voice, warm and comfortable as fur, but the vision had taken away all the clumsiness of his accent and his broken pronunciation.  “I can help that, Lady Silence, if you’ll let me.”

Silna tilted her head.

“I can restore your tongue to you,” the thing that was not Goodsir said.  “I will be your new killing spirit, your weapon against the newcomers, your instrument of balance.  And I don’t need anything of your body at all.”

She would not be tricked.  She would have rather had Cook, in all his murderousness, than this evil, which was something greater and wilder than a man.  The spirits that did not make demands of your body were apt to make demands of your intentions.  It would twist her to its will—it would become not her partner or her counterpart but her master.  It would make her hurt.

These things came from time to time.  Untrustworthy _angakuit_ harnessed them willingly; gullible ones were tricked into lending their own souls to the creatures.  She would be neither.

“Don’t you want to rejoin your people?” it said.  “Don’t you quail with loneliness here?  You’ll starve, you’ll cave in like melting snow unless you let me help you.”  It was no longer even pretending to be Goodsir—its eyes were the color of the moon.  Its teeth looked like a seal’s whiskers.  It was every bit of game the waters had ever kept from them, every mouthful of fresh meat that her friends had ever died for want of.

It would not be fair to her.  It was not honest.  It was not even wild—it was too calculating for that—and so it could not be tamed even if she trusted herself to have the will to break it.

She shook her head.

“I’ll drive away the beasts you feed upon,” it said.  “I’ll surround you with wasteland.”

Fine.  It might be a relief to die—in such a way, even, where she would not bear any guilt or it, where she would not feel like a coward.

When the creature vanished, the snow where it had stood was blackened, as if a great fire had burned out there, leaving behind soot but no warmth.

Silna walked on.

*

The spirit kept its word.  Silna journeyed through desolation.

She could have made camp somewhere, she knew, but to settle down enough to make a house where she knew there was no game was a surrender she didn’t yet want to make.  She understood—in the vague, frostbitten way she understood anything in those days of hunger—that all her perseverance would earn her was a death that would come when she would already be too exhausted to build a shelter for herself.  She knew that.  But moving at least gave her something to do besides starve and die.  It whiled away the hours.

In the end, she lay on her back looking up at a clear blue sky.

_I want to see my father.  For him to come back to me.  For me to go to him._

_I told him I wasn’t ready.  I said I couldn’t lose him._

She closed her eyes.  Her heart was a low, steady drumbeat in her chest, persistent despite everything; it had become the strongest part of her.

In that quiet darkness, Silna’s father returned to her, the only wish she had ever been granted.

He leaned over her, his familiar face made just a touch strange by being more rounded in the cheeks, as though he’d had more to eat in death than he’d ever had in life; she was glad.  She reached up to touch him.  She was allowed to do it—the vision did not melt away.  She felt the warmth of his skin and the sleek, cold prickliness of his clothing.  She felt his lips crinkle into a wordless smile—saw it, yes, but felt it too, her hand at his mouth, as if she’d gone blind.  Were her eyes still closed?  She couldn’t tell.  It didn’t matter.

He sang to her as she had sung to the spirits.

She wanted to beg him to instead send her away into death with the songs he’d sung to her when she’d been just a child, when she’d been sick and sullen and he’d fed her spoonfuls of rich seal broth.  But those days were gone: she could no more plead with him than he could sing her lullabies.  Words were beyond them both.  Only these wordless melodies were left, and they were not made for one person to talk to another.

All the little intimacies of their life together were gone now, severed on both sides: all that was left was death and grandeur.

And touch, she reminded herself, curling her fingers into the fur of his hood, moving her thumb against the soft, dry expanse of his forehead.  This was only theirs.  No spirit had taken this clumsy, groping contact from them.  Even now, she could bury her head against her father’s chest and weep.  And he would know from that, without being told, everything she could not say, all her fears and failures.

But he wiped her tears away.  He wore nothing on his hands, but his skin was warm.

She had moved on her own to a crouch, but he raised her now to her feet and pointed.

 _There_ , he seemed to be saying.  _Over there._

 _But I am done,_ she wanted to object.  _I am dying._

But for all he’d loved her, he’d never been soft with her—you did not coddle the child who’d been marked to follow in your footsteps.  He had pressed her beyond her endurance before.  When she was seven, she had been the one to wipe the blood from his lips after he’d fed the _tuunbaq_ his tongue.  She hadn’t been allowed to turn away.

So of course, she thought, almost dryly, of course she was not being allowed to die.

 _I’m standing._ She spread out her arms.  _I’ll walk.  Is that all you wanted?_

He took her chin between his thumb and forefinger: the old, old gesture of her childhood.  Despite the numbness of her skin, she felt it all.  Warmth, callused fingertips, tenderness.

She turned away then, walking in the direction he’d pointed out for her; she did not want to have to see him vanish.  It was hard enough to know that he would.

She trudged through the snow, wondering how many steps it would take now to stop her stubborn heart in her chest, wondering when whatever spirit had taken an interest in her horrible slogging-on would be satisfied.  Hadn’t she paid by now for her failures?

But no, no, it was too tempting to think all this had blighted her and her alone.  She had lost the _tuunbaq_ and this was what had happened to her because of it.  That wasn’t punishment but only consequence, the natural shape of the world; you could never turn back from being an _angakkuq_ , you could never take up an ordinary place again.  This was just the way.  And she suffered no more than her people would—her people would not now be served by the sacred balance the _tuunbaq_ , once bound, had given them.  Their dead would rise in number.  Their lives would dwindle in holiness.  Their tie to their land would be less now, would always be somewhat withered.

The _angakkuq_ and the _tuunbaq_ had formed a bloody, painful knot that tied the people to the rhythms and spirits of their land, and now it was gone.  And that had happened to them all: her body was parted from them, but her fate was still her own, and theirs hers.

She stopped, breathing in the cold, and listened.  She could hear nothing.  In the mist, she could not see, either.  But nevertheless—

She was not being punished, she thought again.  It felt like she was trying to remember a dream.  She was not being punished—punishment was resolution, and nothing here was resolved.  She was only enduring.  She was surviving and communing and wandering and caring, and if she were doing all those things, she was, perhaps, upholding something.  Her life was a tradition and ritual that went beyond anything that had happened within her living of it.

She sang out across the ice.  Her voice was dry and cracked.

A new creature came to her through the fog.

It did not dress in any person’s skin.  It would, she suspect, scorn such things.  All but the _angakuit_ were prey—it could sometimes be persuaded not to feed, but it could not be brought to admire.  Its face was a little like a child’s and might over the years grow to be a little like a man’s, but its body was like a young bear's.  It was smaller than its predecessor, with some strange seal-like touches to it, whiskers on its fine-featured face and a blubbery sleekness to its frame.  It was new.

It looked at her without love or anger or pity.  Only a spark of recognition that would keep it, for a moment, from devouring her.

Silna sang.

And because she could not offer it her tongue, but knew she must give it something—there must always be something—she gave it one of her ears instead.  The cartilage made an awful sound as her knife sawed through it, but she gritted her teeth against the pain and revulsion.  A sheet of hot blood streamed down the side of her face.  This was the way.

She held out her gift.  Steam rose from the blood in the cup of her hand.  Her ear, severed from her head, looked flat and small and plain.  No great offering.

But its lips closed so gently around her fingers as it took away only what she had meant to give.  It stared at her with its cold, frost-colored eyes and then galloped suddenly away.

Silna stood swaying, trying not to fall.

The new _tuunbaq_ returned to her with a seal, more meat than she had seen in months.

 _Eat,_ its killer’s gaze seemed to say to her.  _Eat and live._ It echoed, somehow, a few fragments of her song.  _We are still here,_ it promised as she took her knife—still wet with her own blood—to the seal and began to butcher it.  _We are not gone.  We are not finished.  This is not the end of anything._


End file.
